Why Get a Pricey Diploma When a Bleepin' Badge Will Do?

James Marshall Crotty
, ContributorI cover education as a sector and as the bedrock of all sectors.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Top tech companies like Microsoft, in fact, are already using badges to exhibit employee and partner knowledge of programs and applications in areas like software development, systems management, and web development. According to Microsoft, “These badges are your assurance that a Microsoft partner has met specific criteria that ensure the quality and reliability of the applications or services they offer.”

Khan Academy, which provides free online lectures to K-12 learners, and OpenStudy, which runs college-level online study groups based on OpenCourseWare – the MIT content backbone to the exciting MITx interactive platform featured in a previous Crotty post – are already providing badges for student contribution to discussions, excellence in answering questions, and in providing help to fellow students. Don’t sneer at these “softer skills.” By rewarding cooperative learning, such badges mirror the team-oriented environment at many corporations (especially tech-heavy workplaces). Moreoever, the proposed low-cost MITx “certificate” for completion of a course or a set of courses is really just another form of badge. If successful, this free-course-plus-badge model would be a huge step towards a self-directed, self-tailored, free and certified online university experience.

My experience coaching competitive debate teaches me that if badges could act as a difficult-to-attain and highly coveted digital trophy, they could spur academic performance across the demographic spectrum. Especially if there was prize money attached. Sure enough, one badge provider does just that.

Connecticut-based TopCoder, billed as "the world's largest competitive community for software development and digital creation," provides cash awards at its online programming contests. Moreover, when one clicks on the badge widget for a TopCode contestant, you get a breakdown of that person’s performance versus other competitors. I can already foresee fantasy leagues developing around academic sports (including Robotics, Math, Academic Decathlon, Speech and Debate) based on TopCoder's widget model.

However, it’s not all rosy in Badge Land. For example, commentators like Alex Reid, associate professor of English at the University of Buffalo, question the effect that badges will have on a traditional liberal arts education. “Extrinsic rewards like badges might be good incentives for certain kinds of rote behaviors or to get someone to try something new. But, as I understand it, they have a negative impact on creative, problem-solving activities (i.e. the kinds of things we really need our students to learn to do),” wrote Reid, in his scathing post entitled “Welcome To Badge World.” “These are the things you have to want to do for some intrinsic reason, not to get some badge,” he adds.

Even if Reid's Foucault-inflected fear of the "panoptic glare of the badge police" seems overwrought, he's not alone in his distaste for the badge-i-fied commodification of innocuous human endeavors. According to the Wall St. Journal, Dale Doherty, editor of Make Magazine, also worries that there “will be sites that just dispense badges like candy, and that doesn’t help create any kind of credential around them.” In addition, students could easily forgo studying a challenging subject in order to accrue easy-to-attain badges that merely highlight skills they already possess. Ed-Tech Blogger Audrey Watters believes that educators need to be wary of attempts to take the innovative and fun activity of learning and turn it into a monotonous system in which “the only thing that really compels you to opt for a particular learning goal is the promise to ‘level up.’”

Indeed, as game theory increasingly invades discussions of pedagogy, there is a fear that students will jump from skill to skill in fanatical pursuit of badges (like earning points for killing pigs in Angry Birds) without a coherent theme or direction. In addition, a fevered pursuit of badges might lead to overcrowding on a resume, to the point that badges look fabricated (even as Mozilla and others work to make them forgery-proof). Akin to a film website that is adorned with awards from too many festivals (one more esoteric than the next), badge inflation might one day rival grade inflation.

The biggest knock on badges, however, is that they are another shallow gimmick that fails to solve an age-old problem: quality assurance. We will likely need to rank badge issuers (and not with badges) just as we rank colleges and universities. However, as anyone who has read my thoughts on college rankings can attest, rankings can be highly subjective without transparent, universally agreed standards.

Which brings us back to the perennial question here at Crotty on Education: how does an employer choose between two or more applicants when they have the exact same badges required for the job? Outside of post-graduate competency testing, as found at the Certified Business Laureate, there’s no easy answer. However, once we find empirical ways to verify competency via accredited and ranked badge providers, not only might traditional education brands and their pals in the standardized test industry lose their monopoly on credentialing, but badges themselves might gain the widespread legitimacy they currently lack. If that happens, we will be a step closer to destroying the time-consuming, budget-busting, bubble-inducing myth that everyone must have a four-year college degree to succeed in America.

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